AFRICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS TOUR

Our African American Civil Rights Tour will take you to historic sites related to our Black Heritage and present-day places significant in the development of the African American community in Memphis.  Please take a moment to review just some of the interesting places that you will see on this tour.

This tour is a narrated riding tour with picture stops.  Click below to see packages that include stopping to tour inside various attractions described below.

• In 1968 an important labor dispute brought Dr. Martin Luther King to Memphis.  A strike was raised by the City of Memphis Sanitation Workers that escalated into a full-fledged commitment to human dignity, economic equity, and segregation.  On April 4, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel, now the National Civil Rights Museum.  Your Sweet Magnolia tour guide will take you to the spot of the assassination for a presentation.

• Beale St. Baptist Church, the first brick constructed multistory church in the US built by African Americans for an African American congregation.  In the basement of the church is where Ida B. Well wrote about the violence and lynching of black men in the late 1800's for the "Memphis Free Speech and Headlight" newspaper.
• Manson Temple Church of God in Christ, (GOGIC) the site of the last sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King before his assassination at the Lorraine Hotel.  C.H. Mason, founder of COGIC, the largest Pentecostal church in the world, is enshrined in the church building.
• Booker T. Washington High School, winner of the Race of the Top Commencement Challenge, is where President Barack Obama came to Memphis to speak at their 2011 commencement.  The alma mater at Booker T. Washington include Benjamin Hooks, Director of the NWACP, Marion Barry, former mayor of Washington DC, Maurice White of Earth, Wind and Fire and many more noted Black Americans.
• Robert Church Park, honoring the South's first black millionaire, and Lemoyne-Owen College, the oldest historical black college in the South.
• Tom Lee Park on the banks of the Mississippi River where you will stop to view the Sculpture of Tom Lee, a selfless hero who with his little boat the ZEV rescued 32 passengers of the sinking steamboat, the M.E. Norman.

• St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital where black architect, Paul Williams, designed the first building of the hospital.
• Slavehaven at the Burkle Estate, an Underground Railroad Safe House.

• Slavehaven
• NCRM